Common Sense Prevails for a Change!

The legislation designed to 'age check' people accessing porn sites in the UK has been quietly dropped. While I'm sure some people will be unhappy about this as it was designed to protect young children in particular from accessing porn, it seems the Government has come to realise that the whole idea is fraught with insurmountable problems. Not least of which is the simple fact that it would take about five minutes for all the carefully constructed safeguards to be circumvented, and knowing that in advance it would have been a complete joke to go ahead with the proposals.

I do agree that children should not be able to access porn, but a program I watched not so long ago seemed to suggest that the legislation would have been ineffective because it only applied to sites like Pornhub and from what I saw most kids watch porn on Facebook and Twitter (neither of which would have been affected, and good look getting anywhere with moderating those fuckers). I'm afraid the truth is, the Genie is out of the bottle and it cannot be put back in, the internet is basically uncontrollable, and so prevalent has it become in our lives that any notion of controlling it or reigning it in is completely laughable.

And what I really didn't like about the Government's proposals was the idea that viewers should have to give their information to PornHub to prove their age. Have we learned nothing from Ashley Madison and other leaks? Wouldn't this data become a prime target for hackers eager to get information to embarrass and potentially blackmail Pornhub's customers?

So for once, common sense seems to have prevailed, even though I am sure there will be activists planning a march as soon as a window opens up for one... I sympathise with their ambitions to protect children from seeing the kind of porn we have these days, but these ideas were unworkable and would not have achieved anything except causing huge inconvenience to legitimate viewers and exposing them to data fraud.

Unfortunately as hard as it is for these people to accept, there is no 'plan of action' which will achieve what they want to achieve. The sad truth is with most of the UK having completely unfettered access to smartphones and people viewing that as a basic human right these days, there simply is no answer to this problem other than removing the tools to access the thing they want to see, and that is simply not going to happen is it?